The Fox in the Attic (32 page)

At the lonely Hermitage on the downs Nellie had just set the wash-tub in the new sink. Beside her, in a warm corner near the fire, baby Sylvanus (now three weeks old) was sleeping in his basket. Cold water from the bucket, hot from the steaming kettle on the hob ... Nellie tested the temperature with her bare elbow to get it just right, and then—discarding her poppy for fear the wire might scratch the infant—lifted the tiny object out of its warm snuggle and laid it on her knees to undress it.

Waking abruptly it wailed, and began to quiver. She had laid it face-down, and in its anger the scalp blushed reddish through the sparse black hair. The simple seminal ego within it was awash with rage. In the transports of its rage the transparent skin on its tiny naked back suddenly marbled with quick-flushing veins, while the helpless waving fists were drained of their blood and turned a bluish-gray. Then she rolled the object over face-up again. Now apparently it was too angry to cry out at all—it hadn't the breath; but the chin quivered like the reed of a musical instrument and the whole face crinkled.

Competently and gently, like dusting fragile porcelain—but a bit absently, as if the porcelain was unloved—Nellie wiped the eyes with a swab of cotton-wool. Then she made little spills of the cotton-wool, dipped them in oil and twiddled them in those defenseless ears and nostrils. The infant's head was too heavy for it to be able to move it but every other inch of its body jerked and shook in paroxysms of rage and sneezing, and at every such movement all its tender contours crumpled and collapsed like a half-deflated balloon.

It was only now Nellie remembered to swathe it in the towel which hung warming before the fire.

Indoors the light was already failing, and Nellie stopped for a moment to light the lamp. But from outside through the open door still came the sound of sawing; for Sunday or not the carpenter had to get that shed finished in time, and it was quite an elaborate piece of work.

Sighing (from mild indigestion) Nellie soaped the wobbling heavy head, then held it out over the sink to rinse it. Next, her large hands began soaping the convulsive, prehominid little body and limbs. But now the carpenter's dog Charlie—a young spaniel with a talent for comedy—had grown disgusted with the smell of sawdust outside with his master and wandered into Nellie's kitchen. After one quick apologetic smirk at his hostess he began nosing around eagerly; but each time he found some new smell that amused him he glanced again momentarily at Nellie, and smirked his thanks politely. With her eyes on this engaging dog and hardly aware what she was doing Nellie submerged the baby's body and rinsed that too. At the benevolent touch of the warm water rage instantly subsided; but his moment of comfort was brief, for she lifted him out to dry him—and instantly rage returned.

Then Nellie opened her own box of powder that she had set ready on the Windsor chair at her side. It was a cheap brand, and the scent drove the dog completely dippy. Doing the familiar job by rote Nellie watched him—and broke into a smile for the first time for ages. For Charlie would fawn towards the powder-box and then halt, humbly, at least two feet from it. There he bowed deeply, right to the ground, and took one distant sniff. Then he danced round the room like a ballerina till his ecstasy was expended: then he fawned back again, praying to the gracious box for yet one more replenishing sniff. When Nellie actually began powdering the baby, for a dog's nose no doubt that scent billowed on the air and so his state of religious ecstasy was rendered continuous. He ran round the tiny room at incredible speed; though how he avoided colliding with the crowded furniture was pretty miraculous, for he ran with his eyes rolled up to heaven till the whites showed—and Nellie laughed aloud.

Engrossed as she was in watching Charlie, none the less she powdered the baby's body expertly all over in every crease: with scarcely a glance she folded clean napkins and put them on him and pinned them, and wrapped him again in the flannelette nightgown that did up at the back with tapes. But there was one item of common practice Nellie left out. I don't mean just that she had forgotten to oil his bottom before putting the napkins on (she remembered that afterwards, when it was all finished and he was back in his Moses-basket—but what the hell, just for once!): no, I mean that she hadn't kissed him. That was something as yet Nellie had never ever done.

Before he was born Nellie had hated him. But now she was completely indifferent to him, for Rachel's death had numbed her. That indifference wouldn't last much longer, however; for if Nellie couldn't escape like Mitzi out of disaster into God, neither could she long remain like Hitler—cooped up with his disaster in the prison that was the ring-fence of
himself
. For Nellie's central “I” was minimal. Hers was a “self” consciousness only really vivid ever towards its periphery—at its sensitive points of contact with other people: whatever happened at the center to Nellie always surfaced out there sooner or later, transmuted into enigmatic compulsions of love or hate. Before long, Nellie's numbness
must
melt in a very cataract of feeling: but of love ... Sylvanus her only son and she a widow? Or of hate ... had Sylvanus never been conceived Little Rachel need never have died? Or both?

Tonight, as Nellie carried the bathwater to empty it outside, she caught sight of Little Rachel smiling down at her from her fretwork frame on the kitchen wall and burst into tears.

Charlie nuzzled her knee with his soft nozzle. How passionately she wished that Charlie was hers! But now the carpenter was whistling for Charlie: Gwilym's shed was almost ready—and just in time—but the daylight was quite gone now and he had to stop.

Packing his tools, the carpenter hoped kind Mrs. Tuckett had saved him a good tea. “Night, Missus: marnin' to finish un'!”

Somehow Nellie managed to answer “Goodnight.” The man and the dog were gone; and only the faint evening churchbells of distant Mellton floated to Nellie on the still air, sounding infinitely remote.

Past midnight now; and the only light still showing in all snowy Lorienburg shone from the window of Otto's office, for Sunday or no Otto would go on working just so long as he could keep awake: Otto dreaded his bed. Everyone else seemed to be sleeping. All their sealed windows were dark. Heavy curtains occluded even the nightlight burning in the twins' room: within, its gleam just revealed them as two mere molehills in the middle of the blankets evidently not needing to breathe. And likewise (through the door he always left open onto the stairs) the faint glow from his overheated stove just showed Augustine: he was smiling in his sleep, and stroking the pillow. But elsewhere the darkness of the silent house was everywhere profound. Mitzi, in her own private darkness within it, dreamed she was weightless and climbing a ladder; but each rung beneath her vanished as she took her foot off it, and the ladder was topless.

Only in the billowing darkness of the attics above two eyes were open, and staring. Endlessly cooped-up there, knowing he could never again leave these attics alive, something long under intolerable strain in Wolff was beginning to break at last.

November the Eleventh: in Wolff's eyes and many others “blackest day in the calendar, day that the traitors sold Germany down the river ...”

Germany had not been defeated: whatever the world pretended, she had not been defeated! For in childhood the axiom that Germany
could not be
defeated had been imbedded in Wolff deep in his core of intuited knowledge, far below all corrective reach of perception or reason.

This, then, was the early but abiding disaster of Wolff and his kind: transcendental truth had set them at logger-heads with all reality, a deadlock Wolff could not break. However, in the course of his self-immolation on the altar of “Germany” Wolff's over-altruist self had by now so atrophied it could no longer contain this his Disaster: yet of its nature that disaster allowed no normal outlet—neither into God nor man. Final escape could be only into the absolute unreality of death; but in the meantime Wolff had turned, as to Death's twin and surrogate-on-earth, to Romantic Love: sole comparable realm, with Death's, of the Unreal.

Thus, in the same knightly way as Palamon in his Athenian tower, this Wolff had also fallen deeply into romantic love last summer with the unknown girl seen “romen to and fro” beneath him in the garden. For Mitzi's yellow hair too was

and like Palamon, the moment he saw it Wolff too had

Wolff still knew nothing about Mitzi; for she was too sacred to speak of even to Franz. They could never meet: this girl he called “his” must never know he existed ... But that was all as it should be, for this kind of loving alone could have suited Wolff, and his love was all the more deep and poignant for being unreal.

Now Reality had broken into even this charmed circle too, so that tonight Wolff knew his jangled nerves might no longer turn for solace to what had lately become its habitual source for him—to inward dramas of killing himself in Mitzi's presence, to the exquisite pleasure of dying with his face bathed in Mitzi's scalding tears. Yet even tonight his homing thoughts unwatched kept creeping back willy-nilly towards this their usual performance, and each such time his reverie was shattered anew by the recurring shock of those two lovers seen stumbling together through the snow!

Each such blow left something defenseless in Wolff weaker, till finally the intolerable tension snapped at last.
A German girl who accepted an Englishman's advances, and this her guilty lover
... THEY MUST BE KILLED. It was a very voice from outside: the most compulsive call of Conscience even this addict had ever heard.

Why had Wolff not plunged on them from his window that first moment he saw them together—like a plummet, like an avenging Lucifer destroying himself and them together all three?

Perhaps he might have—had they come near enough. Yet for him that would surely have been altogether too soon! For this was murder; and surely the essence of murder lies always less in the final perfunctory act than in the malice prepense: in the turning it over and over and over beforehand in one's mind. No, this must be carefully planned. Wolff was ignorant even, as yet, who slept where in those stories downstairs he had never entered. No precipitate act, this; but rather, a passionless duty he had to perform, a punishment he had to inflict: his last and supreme sacrifice to offer on Germany's altar, this was an act to be done in the coldest of cold blood ... yet at the very thought of coming on Mitzi asleep and killing her an excruciating flame lit in the pit of his stomach, constricting his breathing!

The supernatural voice had hit Wolff at first with the suddenness and violence of an electric shock, striking him rigid; but now the rigor had passed, leaving all over him a heavenly glow. Vividly now Wolff saw himself creeping through the dark and silent house like the angel of death: he saw himself silently opening a door, within which lay Mitzi still and white on her bed with her eyelids closed and her hair all dispread: he stretched himself on her like Elisha on the Shunammite child ... and saw his two hands close to his own eyes as they smothered her with the pillow ...

Wolff was huddled the while face-down on his attic floor, and the heart in his breast thumped wilder and wilder for beneath his taut overlaying weight on the lumpish furs he could feel Mitzi's heart beating under him. He could feel it flutter, and stop. At that a thunder as of falling towers was all about him, setting his ear-drums ringing: he felt giddy to bursting, almost as if about to vomit.

Or, ought Mitzi perhaps to die by the knife rather? Yes: for “I ABHOR THINGS STRANGLED” came from the darkness the cold divine command.

Repeating his scene da capo Wolff now dwelt on his teasing point pricking through the thin nightgown to the naked skin so that she half-woke: then the sudden thrust into the throbbing heart itself, the knife pumping in the wound, the withdrawal and the hot blood welling to his elbow. And this time, how peaceful that moment of vision! Wolff's giddiness was gone: in spite of his heart's thumping his troubled spirit was nearer tranquillity now than for many months past.

“A passionless duty ... ?” Wolff was contrite. But nothing could still the new life which coursed in his veins tonight as he slipped quickly out of his wraps, in the dark, and crept down the stairs in his socks.

At nightfall the day's drowsing doubts, like roosting owls, tend to take wing and hoot. Alone in his office tonight Otto could nohow get Mitzi out of his mind. It was their decision at Saturday's conclave that gave him no peace: Had it been right, that decision? For what, after all, had been their real motive in reaching it?

One thing Otto couldn't forget was the tone of Walther's voice exclaiming that there'd never been a blind Kessen ever before: he had sounded almost accusing, as if being born physically faulty meant she
deserved
to be banished from everyone's sight. No one had seemed to consider if she'd be happy “there”: how to make up to Mitzi for her affliction.

Surely there was doubt she'd be even accepted! Normally they'd never take someone so handicapped: at the least it meant special permissions.

Otto sighed. He knew very well, really, that Influence could cope with all that. There'd be benefactions. They'd never refuse ... not a hope. And if they did refuse, what was the alternative? (Otto was holding his list of timber prices close to his eyes but they still wouldn't focus: annoyed, he turned his oil lamp even higher; but it only smoked.) He had to admit Adèle had been unanswerable: marriage was out of the question, for what sort of a Schweinhund would ever marry a blind girl? Some insensitive climbing clerk, for her dowry and connections? Surely even this was better than that!